Sega’s NBA 2K pushed basketball games toward a new kind of “telerealism,” using motion capture, digitized arenas, multiple camera angles and broadcast-style presentation to make virtual hoops feel remarkably close to television. Yet beneath the razzmatazz, the game exposed a familiar weakness of sports simulations: offense was spectacularly easy, while defense remained frustratingly primitive. The imbalance produced a game built around no-look passes, alley-oops and 360-degree dunks, capturing the NBA’s highlight-reel culture more convincingly than its underlying fundamentals. As Spiegler put it, “it’s defense that wins real basketball games,” leaving NBA 2K impressively realistic in appearance but still missing a crucial piece of the real thing.
***
The National Basketball Association was one of the marketing marvels of the 90's. So it is no surprise that N.B.A. simulations have been a major focus for videogame makers, especially in an era when motion-capture technology and high-speed rendering allow the developers to offer nearly realistic games. Or rather, "telerealistic" games, since television is the driving medium behind the recent success of. both the league and the league-inspired games. Many of today's basketball video games are licensed N.B.A. products that feature full player rosters, with images of the real athletes' faces skillfully mapped onto their virtual bodies. At the top of this genre is NBA 2K, by Sega Sports for the Sega Dreamcast console.
Short of building in celebrity spectators and hordes of photographers, every effort has been made to mimic a televised event. The games start with laser-show introductions, include a stream of cliché-ridden patter by the television announcers for the Golden State Warriors, take place in digitized versions of actual stadiums and even include on-court woofing between players. When Kobe Bryant pulls off a two-handed helicopter jam, for example, he is prone to crowing, "I'm bustin' out the whuppin' stick." To add to the telerealism, you can choose from eight camera angles, including isolation cameras that track a single character. Gamers can also call for a replay at any moment. Using the console's controllers, you can then watch the highlight frame by frame or freeze the motion and swoop around the scene, recalling similar effects in "The Matrix."
In actual game play, characters are impressively rendered, their movements neither jerky nor truncated, and they move around the court in an entirely plausible fashion. The telerealism falls apart only in the close-up replays triggered by players or by the game itself. That's when the motions seem stiff and the players wear a single expression: the patented sullen look of the professional athlete. Only as their programmed shooting moves kick in do they start displaying a wider range of facial expressions and stop looking like doll heads on human bodies. In fairness, that is a minor quibble, one that will bother only players with unreasonably high standards for the suspension of disbelief (and nit-picking critics). Certainly, the game has a lot of what gamers call granularity, those little details that make the action seem real. Would-be coaches can call plays, change defenses and make substitutions; fantasy-league devotees can trade players and even conduct a full draft.
Game players with Dr. Frankenstein leanings can build players from scratch, customizing things like height, bulk and skills as well as facial hair, eyewear and sneaker style. This character-making feature had one funny effect: I built a player almost at random, then suddenly realized that I had created a clone of Kurt Rambis, the gawky backup center to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar during the Los Angeles Lakers' "Showtime" era.
